Abstract:
The scientific data management has recently become a big challenge in terms of storage capacity and data access in many disciplinary sectors. Analyze a large amount of data is considered necessary to reply to urgent questions on Earth changes at different spatial and time scale.

As an example, the development and use of multiparametric seafloor observatories enabling a multidisciplinary approach ... to investigate the processes with different time scales (from seconds to decades), has posed the need to collect, organize and maintain a variety of long time series.

MOIST (Multidisciplinary Oceanic Information SysTem) is a data provider initiated within the ESONET NoE project and now under development in the frame of ESFRI (European Research distributed Infrastructure) and EMSO (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory) also in link with presently running projects (e.g. Genesi-DEC, ENVRI, CoopEUS).

MOIST is aimed at hosting multidisciplinary data and metadata obtained by means of INGV seafloor observatories in some EMSO nodes. The core part is the harvester engine which indexes data and keeps track of the data source. It is the unique access point for INGV marine data mining and retrieval. This central part is also connected to other EMSO nodes which preserve their own data acquisition systems and databases.

Purpose:
The MOIST overall configuration constitutes an e-infrastructure which underpins the data flow from acquisition to dissemination. To ensure such working environment a special attention is devoted to all standardisation aspects in terms of file formats, metadata, interoperability, transport protocols and controlled vocabularies for keywords and parameters.

MOIST is able to support EMSO nodes ... according to their own specific scientific campaigns and suite of sensors by organising, indexing and transforming data into a compatible data scheme. MOIST is developed to adopt the most common standards (e.g., OGC, NASA, INSPIRE) for organising its information system. The harvesting and data retrieval system is a full web architecture that can be joined using a web browser or a service client. A user-friendly interface integrates and is able to visualize all the data that are related in time or spatially.

MOIST serves to the development of the data management of the EMSO research infrastructure from the acquisition of the measurements to their availability on the net. This guarantees the quality, completeness and availability for different sciences, anticipating the future by initiating a long-term data preservation strategy.